Ernaux is simply, radically, writing about desire as though she is its agent, not as its object. Ernaux writes with straightforwardness and honesty; she doesn’t justify or explain herself. The text is so underwritten in places as to resemble, almost, a psychoanalyst’s case study.
Three things were made to fit in the palm of your hand: a gun, a bottle, and a dick. —Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi For a long time, whenever I opened a book by Virginie Despentes, I would feel that instead of me reading it, it was reading me. …
No one asked, How does one submit to falling forever, to going to pieces. A question from the inside. —Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts I As the summer heats up and my due date approaches, I’ve been reading Pamela Druckerman’s cult bo…
This Mother’s Day, I'd like to raise a mocktail to all the mothers-to-be, to all of us united in suffering the joys and the indignities of pregnancy, stone-cold sober. As my own mother tells it, she knew she was pregnant with me, her firstb…
It’s no news to anyone that France has a historically masculine-centric culture. The great republican project of the Revolution left women out; in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1791), Olympe de Gouges supplied…
“Existence isn’t a solitary matter,” says the shepherd to the wanderer in Agnès Varda’s 1985 film, Vagabond. This vision of collectivity, the belief that we are all in it together, recurs throughout Varda’s films, from her early, proto–New Wave …
Walking through Paris, Lauren Elkin, Sylvia Whitman, and Krista Halverson discuss Shakespeare and Company and the women who made Paris’s literary culture.
Reimagining the aimlessly wandering woman.
Reimagining the aimlessly wandering woman.I. I started noticing the ads in the magazines I read. Here is a woman in an asymmetrical black swimsuit, a semitransparent palm tree superimposed on her head, a pink pole behind her. Here is a woman lying d…